


Before

by lesbianettes



Series: Merrick Industries [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Death, Coda, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Whump, M/M, Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Whump, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Off-Screen Fill, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Paralysis, Seizures, Temporary Character Death, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:20:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25760485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: What happened before Dr. Kozak started taking samples.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Merrick Industries [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1868779
Comments: 11
Kudos: 333





	Before

When they get tazed, and Nicky finds himself face down on the floor, he still turns his gaze to Joe. He needs to see him. His love has already healed from the stab wounds, but the blood smeared on his neck and blotchy patches on his shirt are still fresh enough to catch the light. With the way the electricity crackles through his muscles and the hands holding him down, he can’t move to see anything else. It’s not as though he wants to anyway. Joe is his world, and the last shred of comfort left in the cold building. 

Then he sees the needles. 

“No!”

Lethal injection is one of the worst ways to go. He’d know. Sometime in the seventies or eighties, he got a hot shot in a dark club and overdosed in Joe’s arms, choking on his own spit, unable to control his spasming body as he drowned in vomit. It was a terrible way to die. He doesn’t want to do it again, and above all else, he doesn’t want that for Joe. Over the centuries, Nicky has experienced possibly every single way a person could pass, and every level of pain a death can bring. He’s intimately familiar with merciful emptiness as well. Somewhere in the middle ages, he was put out of his beaten misery in the streets of Germany, and Andy dragged his dead body back to safety to heal. He cannot handle a death like this one now, when he needs to be strong for Joe. 

It doesn’t kill them. 

He feels the moment his brain seems to disconnect from his body, replaced instead with a cold sensation. He can’t move. His eyes stay on Joe, unable to see anything else, until he’s dragged away and Nicky can’t see him. That’s the most terrifying part so far. He can handle anything so long as he has Joe within reach, knows that the love of his life is beside him and they’re not going through it alone. It’s always better to know. He strains to reach for him, do anything at all, but his body is strictly uncooperative. Nothing he does is enough, even when they lift him up too and take him away. As he goes, his last view of the room is Merrick’s face, angry and excited at the same time. This man is going to put them through hell, he knows already.

By the time they’re brought to the labs, Joe has started having some sort of reaction to the paralytic. Off to the side, his head audibly slams against the tile floor, and Nicky wishes he could crawl over to him and hold him as his body trembles. His head hits the floor again. Nicky can’t even see him, let alone comfort or help him, and it’s killing him just as much to be so close but so far. 

“What’s wrong with him?”

Nicky recognizes that voice. It’s the mercenary in charge of the rest, Keane he thinks, with the heavy steel-toed boots that move past Nicky’s face and kick Joe. He hates him. As hard as he tries, Nicky can’t manage to move to tell him off or do anything besides stay there, watching the speckled tile floor. 

“He’s having a reaction to the drugs,” Dr. Kozak says. She’s somewhere above and behind Nicky’s back. “It should be fine. Leave him be.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Can you clean up the other one, please?”

Keane kneels in front of Nicky.  _ Don’t touch me _ , he tries to scream, but there’s nothing he can do about any of this. All he can do is watch as Keane cuts his shirt off him and wipes away some of the blood off his chest, a white antiseptic cloth turning pink and red. It’s not careful. Rather, it’s a perfunctory sort of touch, like one might iron their clothes, even when he grabs Nicky’s chin and cleans his face. They lock eyes. He must know that Nicky is aware of it all, painfully so, but it must not matter to him as he scrubs away the dried blood remaining from the men in the van who pulled himself and Joe apart. 

“Not dangerous now, are you?” Keane muses.

He brushes his thumb across Nicky’s mouth. If only he could bite him. When this is all over, Nicky will make him, and every one of these bastards, pay. But for now he’s weak, unable to so much as fight it when Keane decides to curl a hand around his throat. He gasps for breath. Ordinarily, he would know how to fight back, perhaps even be able to pry Keane’s hand off him, but paralyzed, he can only suffer. Suffocation is another awful way to die. His vision is going dim around the edges by the time Keane drops him, allowing his head to smack against the floor just like Joe’s. His chest spasms as he coughs for breath again, bruises beginning to fade from his neck already. 

“Can you get him on the table?”

Keane lifts Nicky up off the ground and brings him to a cold metal table, one of two. They’re parallel, close, but not too much so. A solid few feet of space between them will prevent Nicky from ever reaching out to Joe, even if he has his hands free. From the new vantage point atop the table, even as Keane begins to strap him down, he can see Joe’s body on the floor, twitching and shaking. It’s a seizure, he realizes. Booker had those after a particularly nasty head injury during the 20s, leaving them to spend hours at home for the few days it took his brain to heal. Whatever was given to them was that bad.

One of his fingers twitches.

“Dr. Kozak,” Keane says. He cuts through the zip ties on Nicky’s wrists to restrain his arms at his sides. “It’s starting to wear off. You might want to give that one another dose.”

“He has a name,” Nicky manages to choke out.

It’s not like he wants to hear Joe’s name in their voices, or give them that kind of power, but he can’t stand the objectification of someone so complex and beautiful. Joe isn’t just an experiment or a plaything for them. He’s complex. He’s beautiful.

Since Nicky has been fully restrained now, Dr. Kozak doesn’t bother with sedating him again, something he finds himself grateful for. He doesn’t want to be grateful to her for anything, but the feeling rises when he’s able to turn his head and watch Joe, make sure he’s safe, keep him within sight even if not within reach. As their bodies process the paralytic, Joe seems to have stopped seizing, at the very least. Instead he’s still. That’s almost worse, he thinks, as Keane all but tosses his body onto the other lab table and secures him. Through all of this, though he’s now clean and stripped of his shirt in the same way as Nicky, he doesn’t stir or wake up. Normally, it could be chalked up to that bad reaction but- but they don’t get those. He thinks of heroin.

“No,” he rasps. “You didn’t.”

Kozak gives him a strange look and carries on with what she’s doing. An IV first, tucked into the crook of Joe’s arm, taped down to keep it in place even when Joe wakes up and fights back. She connects all these little monitors, frighteningly modern, to him. They light up the little screen. That, Nicky recognizes, from TV dramas in dingy diners and reading a medical journal every few months, just to know. The flat lines should be moving. They all have hearts still. Nicky knows Joe has a heart that beats solid and warm beneath his cheek when he rests his head against his chest, knows there is no more comforting sound in the world. But according to the monitors, there’s nothing. 

“You killed him!”

“He’ll come back.”

Nicky strains to get up. Get to him. Joe is dead, and yes he’s come back a thousand times before but that doesn’t mean he always will, or that it doesn’t hurt worse than anything else in the universe to see him dead. He needs to hold him until he’s back, brush his hair out of his face, kiss his cold cheeks and make it all better. Nicky needs to be there beside him. 

She comes over to him now and attaches him to all the same monitors. His screen lights up and beeps right away. It’s loud, especially in the absence of any noise from Joe. He can’t look away from him. If he just stares at him, maybe he can pretend that he’s alive, because it shouldn’t ever take this long.

“You killed him.”

Instead of responding, she picks up a scalpel and presses it against Nicky’s chest. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @transnicolo


End file.
